Open Source Geo Certification
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| Number of Parts | 188 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/31655 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2014 | |
| Production Place | Portland, Oregon, United States of America |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
doing certification because it's boring, it's dry, it's paperwork. And OSU doesn't have any employees who you can tell what to do but it's only volunteers who you have to ask and nobody's really interested in doing this. And this is why I picked this up two years ago and tried to get something up and running that would be able to do certification and I stumbled and fell so many slippery
00:26
slopes that I'm on the verge of shelving the whole thing. But being here one day, having so many people talk to me that this is needed, I got some more energy that I really want to push this.
00:40
But I need your help. So anybody else who wants to make a statement about what certification makes sense or not? I'm Alex Chaucer, I'm from a small college in upstate New York. Thinking a little bit about this in terms of digital badges, if there's some way to
01:03
have a consortium of organizations in some way that can agree upon some basic badges and then have maybe in a MOOC or some sort of open coursework that people can take and
01:21
somehow show their work in a portfolio that can then, you know, people can earn badges of some sort. So the idea of some sort of a digital badge framework that can be expanded and, you know, and built upon is sort of the perspective that I'm thinking about. Okay. Wait a second, I'm trying to reflect this and then you and then you.
01:44
Is it like your perspective from an education side of things that you want to give your people who leave your place some kind of additional badge that they have for a better profile? Is that right? Did I get that right?
02:02
There it goes again. I'm sorry. I think there's growing interest in general in this idea around micro-credentialing. And there's been some case studies and some work in this area. And it may be for something that's where there's a lot of different types, a lot of different
02:24
ways you can go with it, it might be a better way than saying here's a standard curriculum that's, you know, you start here and you end here. Maybe there's a way to, you know, have little chunks or modules that could have some sort of a digital certification that just says that you did something or that you accomplished
02:42
something. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I would teach at a two-year technical school in IT, and I know in all of our disciplines certification is very important for our graduates. It's one way that industry knows that they meet a certain standard beyond the A or the
03:01
B or the C that perhaps that we gave them. So I think the same thing in GIS is very important. There are no standards here. I mean, there are no standards in terms of certification yet. Something, and I think Esri has a good model with desktop certification and their developer and the whole nine yards.
03:21
And I don't know why we don't have the same thing for some of the applications here. Okay. I didn't forget you, but just to answer to this one, there's different levels of different types of how you do certification, and one of them is by the vendor. They have a vetted interest, obviously. So they sell software, and then they certify the people so that they certify that the
03:43
people can actually use the software. This kind of interest doesn't really exist in an open-source project, because most open-source project is run by volunteers or by a small company. They want to provide their own services. So there is not so much interest as is in a proprietary vendor who wants to sell
04:03
their software.
04:37
And this is Dave Murray, and I would say that a certification program would drive your
04:43
training program, because that is the goal, is to get certified or to get to graduate in with certain types of credentials. What Phil Davis is doing with the FOSS4G Academy, I think, is a great start to that.
05:00
And I think you have a lot of interest in getting that further developed and filling out the entire suite. So I approach it from the standpoint of developing a training curriculum. So that brings us to the body of knowledge.
05:21
So what are you certifying? And the GISC, they have done a big, big body of knowledge for 15 years. It's amazing. It's really big, but it's completely independent of software. It's content. It's like, what is GIS? How does it work? And so on. The professional certification that they offer has a different way of going about it.
05:42
You just submit your documentation. What's your degree? What school did you visit? What conferences? How many workshops did you do? And if you have a stack of this paper, then you get the stamp, and then you have the certification. So that's the second type of the vendor.
06:01
We have the independent, but more like content. It's not software oriented. And now we're trying to find out what's the right way to do it for open source software. And how do you build a body of knowledge for open source software for GeoServer? The best example we currently have is QGIS. They're working on a set of 700 questions that you have to answer.
06:24
And there can be randomized 100 questions out of those. And if you pass those, then you get the certification. So that's another way of maybe doing it. So there's many different options of how you can do it. So yeah, I'm a graduate student at Idaho State University.
06:42
And as part of our curriculum, we have to help develop extensions and work on the map window program, which is also like QGIS. So I can see a lot of that going into having to accomplish certain tasks as part of graduate work or PhD work in order to get certification or to be able to work on that.
07:07
So I can see it being brought into a lot of the university settings. Because in the United States here, a lot of the universities use proprietary software. But a lot of that's starting to change now, where a lot of these departments are
07:20
starting to develop their own open source platforms, which is going to start bringing more and more open source GIS people into the work field. So, yeah. There's one here. I'm sorry to make you run around so much, but.
07:44
So hi, I'm Luis Vermus, OGC, and I work in compliance. And we have also talked inside OGC and with Arnold about, yeah, there is a need for compliance as well in standards. So what I think is I envision, well, if somebody that is going to be maybe open source certified
08:06
needs two things. First, understand the standards. And second, understand the tools. Because you can get certified by tools, as QGIS or ESRI folks does, or you can get certified by technology.
08:22
And that is very concrete. So you pass a test. If you don't pass the test, then you have the body of knowledge, training, et cetera, that you can provide to the person that wants to get certified. And then you can go parallel or beyond that, just checking his or her background, right?
08:42
Certified that you have not committed a crime, or that your diploma is okay, or that you can speak Portuguese and code in Brazil. I don't know. But yeah. Okay. We're missing one aspect of this. We're talking about standards and interoperability.
09:01
We're talking about technology. We're missing the open source part. If we want to actually certify people on open source, show me a pull request. Show me some community participation. That's what makes this community here great. And if I'm going to stick an open source approved license on someone's CV, I want to actually know they can behave politely in public and get things done in a collaborative fashion.
09:30
Okay. Just a quick comment on this. This is interesting because we already developed that metaspatial. It's there now. Sorry for being a bit later.
09:40
We've developed different aspects. And one of those aspects is that there is developer perspective for certification, but also user perspective. So the user probably doesn't have to know so much about the open source ongoings. You should be able to file a bug report without insulting people.
10:00
And make it so that the developer can actually do something with this. Because a lot of time is wasted and say, hey, this doesn't work. Well, send a bug report. No, don't make a screenshot. Send the text. No, don't paste it here. Paste it into Facebook. So these kind of things. We would want to have users of open source know how to work with open source from the developer perspective.
10:35
So you see it's already getting pretty broad, the whole thing. So we have developers.
10:40
We have users. I want to have consultants who sell open source in the right way. They have to know how it works. So a consultant for open source should know how it works. And should tell their client. I have so many clients who approach me and say, hey, we have everything open source. And then I look at it and it's open source. But it's four years old. And they can't update it because they just hacked into the code without telling anybody.
11:02
And that architecture is dead. You can just throw it away and put a new one there because they didn't know how to do it. So the consultants should know how to consult their clients in a way that gives them generic and updateable infrastructure. So we got already three or maybe even four and the advocacy aspect.
11:23
So there was another. You had a question. I was just going to follow on on Jody. I was thinking along the very same lines that in a way we have a certification, de facto certification program. And that is how many bug fixes you put in. And it grows from there until you're a full committer. And that's kind of top level certification really if you're going to go sell your stuff.
11:44
And maybe formalizing that might be one approach to do. Because one of the things that can do is encourage people not to just be users but to commit. And it doesn't have to be committed in code. It can be committed in documentation, examples, whatever. That's what we developers are all dreaming about.
12:01
Yeah, that's right. The reality is that it's only a ratio of 1,000 to 1 users to developers. There's a question there or comment.
12:24
Some of you may be familiar with ASPRS, American Society of Photogrammetry Remote Sensing. They have a certification program for GIS remote sensing photogrammetry. And it's more than just filling in blanks and sending a check to the organization.
12:42
It's a three-hour examination after you get letters or recommendation sent in, kind of a profile of your experience. And if you pass that phase, then they allow you to take the exam. If you pass the exam, and there's not a whole lot of folks around the country that are certified that way,
13:05
but it is an international professional organization that focuses on the conceptual side, GIS, but also the support of technologies. So you have to know something about remote sensing, something about photogrammetry,
13:23
a little bit of surveying in order to get through the exam. But when you're finished, because again, it's an international organization, you have, like other certification programs, you have a unique professional number associated with your certification. Now what we probably need to do is have really kind of a combination of this overall
13:44
from the conceptual side and then subsets that might be related to some particular aspect of the technology. So we have one level of certification with other technical options that would go along with it
14:04
at the choice of that person who's wanting to take the exam. Does that make any sense? I guess so, but I'm a little jet-lagged, so half of what you said is probably lost. The parallel, like I said, to this ASPRS examination is on the conceptual side,
14:26
making sure somebody understands the concepts of the geospatial technology, also concepts of open source. We had some people bringing up about the software issues in there,
14:41
and so we may have like a tier one where you have the conceptual exam, and then when you apply for the exam, you say, okay, is there like QGIS or some type of server technology that you want so that you say, yes, you passed the conceptual exam with an emphasis in this technology or technologies.
15:07
So you have like subcomponents with that as well. So it's more than just one certification. Well, yeah, that's another aspect.
15:25
It's like we call it accreditation. So if you're a certification institute and you have a curriculum that you want to get tested, then you need to ask people to provide training, and somehow you have to check whether those people who provide the training actually provide the know-how that you're going to test later on.
15:42
So there has to be some cooperation, but it shouldn't be too close because if it's too close, then it's Esri software doing Esri certification, which is not exactly what we want or maybe not what we can do. So what we did here in a second, the process, we tried to break it down into an online test,
16:05
then reference and referrals, and then a personal interview. That was my thought about how it could work so that for the professional consultant, how are you going to test a consultant, whether he's firm in knowing how open source work?
16:21
So but then again, this is a very subjective thing. So how are you going to evaluate this? So this is one aspect we tried to cover the breadth of what we're talking about because there's so many different open source projects, and often it's not enough to just know one of them. So most of the larger infrastructures, they use PostGIS and GeoServer and Leaflet or OpenLayers.
16:43
So you have to know all of it to be a web developer kind of certified professional. Do you need to have different know-how about different technologies? On the other hand, if you're a software developer, you can be certified for GeoServer as a core developer. But this information is already there.
17:01
It's in the stats of the GeoServer project. There is commit stats there, and once you have accumulated them and have your peers say that you are a core developer, that should be enough already. So you don't really need the extra overhead of a certification institute giving you the tag. Is that right?
17:21
Well, I see it as a different profile, right? It wouldn't be the developer profile. It would be like...
17:46
Okay, there was a question there. Just wait, sorry. Yeah, my comment here was on, you know, I like to think about standards, and I think this is a community that really appreciates standards and works a lot with standards.
18:06
I think in solving a problem like this, you need to think about developing certain standards for... And again, I'm going to go back to micro accreditation, right? So if you can develop certain standards for different aspects of a certain tool
18:24
and list out sort of this is what somebody should know in sort of a small module or chunk, and you do that throughout the different tools that are being used, and you have... And I like to think about it as these digital badges, right? Like Boy Scouts, where you earn these badges,
18:43
and you publish those standards as a very high-level agency. Then you allow anybody in the community to develop a training for it. It could be a face-to-face training, it could be an online training. What the agency would have to sign off on is that people that are taking that training
19:03
are accomplishing that skill, so you'd be validating that training, whether it's online or face-to-face, and then you would then issue the digital badge after somebody goes through... After somebody meets certain standards for a specific micro certification. So thinking about a large ecosystem and really planning out what these sort of whatever...
19:28
And it could be based on community involvement, it could be based on contributions, and people that meet those things would then be able to earn those badges. So if you're looking at a developer for a project,
19:43
you could see the types of things that they have accomplished that would then link back to their experience or show evidence of what they accomplished. So it's a much more open framework, but developing essentially standards as your curriculum that anybody could then develop training around.
20:00
Okay. My alarm just went off. We're through with the time. Maybe it takes two, three minutes more, because I have one question that is really interesting for me especially. You were talking about a high-level agency that issues this accreditation. The way that I was thinking about it is it could be a collaboration of different agencies,
20:23
but they would just have to make sure that whoever is issuing the training, whether it's face-to-face or online, the people that complete that are meeting those items in that curriculum. Then we're back to my initial thought, who's going to issue this certification?
20:41
And OSGEO is not really capable of doing it right now, so I tried to start this as a private enterprise and do some business out of it and get the money to fund this whole thing, but whoever I talk to, this is one of the big critics that comes up. Well, why would you earn money to certify me, and who are you to give the certification?
21:01
So the whole thing really needs some kind of high-level accepted body that would be the one to issue certificates. One model might be the GISCI, GIS Certification Institute here in the United States. They were a collection of URISA, GITA, ASPRS,
21:22
and some other organizations that came together to fund this umbrella. And GISCI may be interested in picking this up. I don't know. But I point back to OSGEO. I think maybe we need to work within the framework we've already got there, and they do have the GEO4ALL organization, which is our educator, so that might be us.
21:45
So thanks for all your attention and this intense communication. It was very good for me. And this afternoon at 5 o'clock in 146, the GEO4ALL birds of a feather session is meeting, so maybe some of the thoughts we have can be continued to be discussed there.
22:04
Well, thanks a lot.
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